Students discuss work across disciplines at annual Undergraduate Student Research Symposium
May 26, 2026 Safa Wahidi
Emory College’s annual Undergraduate Student Research Symposium featured more than 130 students who presented their research and discussed their findings. Almost 300 attendees learned about the students’ work across the sciences, humanities and arts.
For many students, the symposium represented the culmination of the Scholarly Inquiry and Research Experience Program (SIRE), in which first-time undergraduate researchers can start their research journeys working alongside a mentor. Other students participated in the symposium following individual department research.
“The symposium is special because it is both a celebration and a learning experience. Our students have the opportunity to share their work, talk with faculty and peers, and see how their research connects to bigger questions across disciplines,” says Ed Goode, senior director of experiential learning in the Emory College Pathways Center.
“It also shows how academic departments, faculty mentors and the Pathways Center work together to help students find their way into meaningful research experiences,” Goode adds.
Meet three students who presented their findings at the symposium.
Looking to the skies at the Emory Observatory
Like stars, blazars appear as point sources in the night sky. To demonstrate how blazar brightness and visibility vary, Echols collected data using Emory’s Cassegrain telescope, capturing images of three blazars consistently every one to two weeks over the course of two months.
“We’re seeing that over the course of our observation period, brightness varied as much as nearly 0.4 magnitudes in either direction from the average,” says Echols, explaining that blazar brightness fluctuates rapidly on short timescales. Because of Echols’s work, future student researchers may use the telescope to study less well-known blazars and their visibility.
Bans, who serves as the Emory Observatory’s director, says that Echols’s research is important for connecting measurable changes in light to understudied physical processes.
“One of the most exciting aspects of this project is that it demonstrates a new way our observatory can be used, showing that even a campus observatory can contribute to time-domain studies of active galaxies billions of light-years away,” Bans says.
Connecting ovarian cancer and drug discovery
MDK is currently associated with cancer treatment resistance and poor prognosis. Lavin’s work, conducted with pharmacology and chemical biology assistant professor Eric Miller’s lab in the Emory School of Medicine, seeks to help develop chemical probes to better understand the role of the protein in disease pathogenesis and response to therapy.
“A lot of times, ovarian cancer isn’t diagnosed until an advanced stage when MDK levels are very high,” Lavin says. “There’s very little known about the binding [of small molecules and disease drivers] to this protein, [in part] because there is not a clear binding pocket in the published structures. We’re trying to develop a series of tools that can be used to identify, characterize and optimize chemical probes for MDK.”
These new molecules will enable interrogation of MDK’s role in ovarian cancer and other diseases, and set the stage for diagnostic and therapeutic development. Lavin adds that she hopes the project will help her someday pursue a career in biotech or life sciences consulting.
“Because my mentor, Eric, is really well connected in the broader pharmacology and chemical biology realm at Emory, I’ve been invited to several of the symposiums with the Emory Center for New Medicines,” Lavin says.
“That is an area that bridges the commercial side of chemistry — specifically drug and pharmaceutical development — with the fundamental basic research side,” she adds. “Exploring that area has shown me how my interests in chemistry and economics come together, and that’s really where I see myself long-term.”
Exploring math in music
Chea started playing piano when she was seven and has long admired Johann Sebastian Bach’s work.
“One particular subject that stood out to me [in class] was the principle of superposition,” Chea says. “In differential equations, superposition means different combinations of the same answer. A solution that combines two answers linearly is also a solution of the original equation.
“I also saw that principle in Bach in the ‘Goldberg Variations.’ Bach combined four folk songs of the time into a single piece. You have different melodies, but they all make sense together,” she says.
Chea’s project illustrates how fractals — infinite shapes in geometry — are also structures in musical composition.
“I took a course called Foundations of Math, an introduction to discrete math,” Chea says. “Sierpiński’s triangle is the triangle made of different triangles. If you take the midpoints of each triangle and draw a triangle out of those, you can go on infinitely. I also saw this reflected in Bach. You can make different combinations of the same melody.”
Chea’s mentor, associate teaching professor of piano Elena Cholakova, notes that Chea’s research was influenced in part by attending guest performances at Emory.
“The ‘Goldberg Variations’ are one of the masterpieces that we have in keyboard repertoire,” Cholakova says. “One of the Candler artists who was at Emory in November, Cameron Carpenter, performed the entire piece at Emerson Hall. Chea really delved into it.
“The symposium was just a really, really great opportunity. Students look into topics they’re interested in and find interdisciplinary connections that they would not have found otherwise,” Cholakova says.
She adds that Chea’s research is a reminder that music is a critical form of scholarship.
“Sometimes there is a bit of a disconnect between research and performance,” Cholakova says. “Performance is research.”
